Women’s careers in low income areas as indicators of country and town dynamics

This chapter aims to shed some more light on the 1920s Chicago school views usually persistently articulated by R. Redfield as the folk-urban ideal types. It is a modest proposal that unskilled migrant women should be recognized as a legitimate category for study. In East Africa, the Vagrancy Acts and Prevention of Prostitution Acts seem to have been used specifically to harass women, and the poor in general. Take for instance Kampala, where throughout the 1950s the City Council and Kibuga officials periodically arrested single women who were found in low income areas of the city. With such an ambiguously broad law any women could be guilty of prostitution. The law seems to have been aimed at controlling the movement of women to town so that female migrants were inevitably regarded as prostitutes. The life history of Fatuma Mukasa is not untypical and illustrates generally the fates and fortunes of the migrant women found in Namuwongo-Wabigalo.